Spying - everybody's doing it

The alliance is in shreds, or will be, they warned in their customary sky-is-falling way. Donât believe it.

This combination of two pictures shows (at L) German Angela Merkel in Paris on February 6, 2012, and (at R) President Barack Obama in Washington on Oct. 8. Obama was personally informed of mobile phone tapping against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which may have begun as early as 2002, German media reported. SAUL LOEB, LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images

Legend has it that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Maybe so, but spying runs a close second for longevity in the mischief sweepstakes.

The reaction to each of these unseemly enterprises is remarkably similar — a quiet understanding that this kind of thing goes on, followed by outbursts of outrage when one or the other is revealed publicly as actually practiced.

That’s what happened when news “broke” that the beavers at the National Security Agency had burrowed into communication traffic of our European allies as well as those of al Qaeda and assorted other bad guys.

The word “broke” is used ironically. Anyone who has lived a few years and hasn’t been sedated for much of that time has at least suspected we’ve been eavesdropping on just about everybody, and everybody’s just as busy monitoring us.

The guess here is that the furor would have fizzled in a day or two if those caught hadn’t included German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Seems Frau Merkel used an unsecure cellphone, which makes me think she’s not as hip as I thought.

Merkel blew a battery. As the personification of German sovereignty, she had to, at least for domestic consumption. The French got angry too; how could we do this to the heirs of Lafayette?

The fuss produced doomsday prophesies from the overly caffeinated foreign policy elite. The alliance is in shreds, or will be, they warned in their customary, sky-is-falling way. Don’t believe it.

Our interests and those of our European allies coincide on too many things, including trade, defense, terrorism and relations with Russia, China and the Arab Muslim Middle East, to be jeopardized fatally by Merkel’s cellphone carelessness.

The sky-is-falling crowd suffered a setback last week when it turned out that millions of phone records supposedly swept up by our NSA were actually turned over by French, Spanish and Italian spy agencies, and maybe even German intelligence services.
As I said, everybody does it, small nations as well as large, though most lack the NSA’s global reach.

Theodoros Pangalos, a one-time foreign minister of Greece, told a radio interviewer that the Greek National Intelligence Service regularly monitored conversations and radio traffic of American ambassadors in Athens and in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Odds are we knew all about it but were in no position to complain, considering our own ventures in this regard. Anyway, the Greek spying passed unmentioned. And a former Italian foreign minister also expressed puzzlement last week at the fuss, insisting everybody does it and everybody knows it.

Our friends, the Israelis, monitor everything we do — besides lobbying the devil out of Washington — and have even been guilty of espionage in this country. Remember Jonathan Pollard? A piece in the Jerusalem Post argued that eavesdropping is “part of the game” and accused the Europeans of “overreacting.”

But why spy on friendly governments and their leaders? How can they harm us? Sometimes unwittingly, history shows.

Led by the infamous Kim Philby, the “Cambridge Five” — British liberals-turned-communists who held high government positions — fed secrets to Moscow during the Cold War before fleeing to the Soviet Union as the cops closed in. The British government, our closest ally, was unaware for years. Only four of the five were ever publicly identified.

Then there’s Gunter Guillaume. Dispatched by the East German Stasi to penetrate the West German government, Guillaume exceeded expectations. He became personal assistant to Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, with access to top-secret information about NATO and defense plans of the Western alliance — until he was caught.

The fact that everybody does it doesn’t justify massive eavesdropping, but neither does it mean it must end. More oversight of intelligence operations is needed, but that could bring Congress more into the equation, which creates new problems. Congress leaks like a 3-day-old diaper.

Whatever we do, we need to be as careful choosing the overseers as we are with the intelligence agencies themselves.

Liberals like to invoke Benjamin Franklin’s argument that those who’d surrender liberty for security usually lose both. It a pithy passage, but not as relevant in our terrorism-ridden time, with its potential for mass destruction.

It’s a shame it’s come to this, but it’s our world and we’ve got to learn how to live in it while sacrificing neither essential liberty nor essential security.